In recent years, most of us have become used to hearing about austerity. Following the 2007 financial crisis, it was said that austerity was the only viable cure. Today, more than 10 years later, the ghost of austerity still haunts Europe and much of the Western World. But this is not the first time that austerity was imposed on people in order to solve a financial crisis. In Five Senses of Austerity, we will go back to socialist Romania in the 1980s: a textbook case of harsh austerity that ended, as some might know, in bloodshed and a coup d’etat.

In each episode austerity will be explored through the lens of one of the five basic senses: hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting.

The podcast is part of the Sound Relations Project based at Central European University, Budapest, and is done in collaboration with the Blinken Open Society Archives.